Treo Essentials

The last stop in this little tour of the picture and video options available to you doesn't have anything directly to do with your Treo device. I'm referring to online picture blogs, which you can use to automatically upload pictures you have taken with your mobile device and share them with others. There are several different online picture blogs, also known as photo blogs, such as SplashBlog (http://www.splashblog.com) and TypePad (http://www.typepad.com). For the purposes of demonstrating how to set up a photo blog for your Treo, I opted to use SplashBlog.

As you might have guessed, SplashBlog consists of two components: a website and a Treo application. The Treo application enables you to specify what pictures you want to publish, and the website is where they end up getting published. To get started with SplashBlog, you must first visit the SplashBlog website and download the Treo application. Here's the link: http://www.splashblog.com/. SplashBlog offers a 30-day trial that you can use to create an account and experiment with the service. You can create a new account using your desktop PC on the SplashBlog website or directly in the SplashBlog application on your Treo.

After you've installed the SplashBlog application on your device and created a SplashBlog account, you can launch the SplashBlog application and begin publishing pictures. The application starts off with a sample blog and an empty blog based on your user name. Go ahead and tap the blog with your name on it. Then tap the Add Photo button to add a photo to the blog. Tap to select a photo from the list shown in the SplashBlog Photo Picker screen. If you don't know the name of the picture to add, you can switch to Preview mode by tapping one of the little buttons along the bottom of the screen. After selecting a photo, you're prompted to enter information about it, including the title and a caption (see Figure 12.15).

When you're finished editing the photo information, tap the OK button to add the photo to the blog on your device. Keep in mind that at this point the photo has not actually been published to the online blog. Add another picture or two if you want, and when you're ready to publish them to the Web, just tap the Sync button. Depending on how many photos you've added, the SplashBlog application churns away for a few moments. When it finishes, the pictures are ready and available for viewing in your online photo blog. Just visit the SplashBlog website, log on to your account, and view your blog. Figure 12.16 shows one of my pictures as it's viewed in the online blog.

Figure 12.16 reveals how convenient it can be to publish photos from your Treo from any location where you have wireless data access. With an online picture blog, you can document a vacation or other adventure in nearly real time as you take pictures and publish them immediately to the Web for others to see and share.